1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a digital thermal transfer printer, and more particularly, to the digital thermal transfer printer comprising not only several heaters drying sequentially transfer ink printed to textile materials, but also a thermal transfer moving horizontally and ejecting hot winds of 180˜600° C. to heat the transfer ink directly to have the production speed of general direct printers to maximize work efficiency, to embody more clear colors of the transfer ink due to the very fast and rapid heating to the textile materials, and eventually to give more trusts to customers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, development of various technologies makes industry, especially industrial products, highly advanced and more competitive than ever. As a result, advertisement or design of the industrial products becomes more important factor of the product market shares. Sequentially, to get better effects of advertisement or design of the industrial products such as a banner or a curtain, various printing methods are applied to form figures or patterns to the industrial products. Thermal transfer printing method or direct printing method is one of such various printing methods.
Thermal transfer printing method utilizes heat to activate transfer ink to transfer the contents (pictures, letters, logos, or designs) described in a transfer paper to textile materials or other transfer objects (an iron plate, a tile, a film, etc). The procedure of such thermal transfer printing method will be explained briefly in the following statement.
Pictures, letters, logos, or designs are inputted to, and edited by a computer. Those edited contents (pictures, letters, logos, or designs) are transformed to a transfer paper, and cut into various shapes, which is called a cutting process. While preparing an original copy of the edited contents through manual works, a transfer object, such as a wood-free paper or a textile material, is arranged. Sequentially, the contents are transferred to the transfer object by utilizing a thermal transfer, which is called a transfer process.
However, the thermal transfer printing method described in the above statements is used to manufacture a banner or a flag in general, and is not suitable to describe various colorful images. Therefore, to describe various colorful images, additional offset printing process is applied. In other words, a print film describing the colorful images is prepared additionally, and transferred to a transfer paper by utilizing transfer ink, which is called the offset printing process.
As described in the above statements, the process transferring the colorful images requests to manufacture additional print film. Therefore, it is troublesome works, and in more, spends too much time and expenses to prepare a sample of the print film.
Particularly, in a process of a small quantity batch production, the print film should be prepared to each colorful image, respectively. Therefore, the print film is hardly prepared because of the problems of time and expenses.
On the contrary, the direct printing method different from the heat transfer printing method utilizing heat, is mostly applied to manufacture all kinds of banners. After editing designs by computer, the direct printing method applies a digital printer, shown in FIG. 1, to manufacture the banners immediately. Therefore, the direct printing method printing the banners through the digital printer directly does not require the process of preparing the print film, and eventually save time and expenses.
However, the direct printing method utilizing the digital printer should adopt an exclusive paper manufactured specially, and does not apply to general textile materials.
In other words, the drying temperature using hot winds at the digital printer is about 60° C., manufacturing efficiency is extremely low so that it takes too much time to dry completely the transfer ink printed to the exclusive paper. In more, the low drying temperature makes the color of the transfer ink change to hardly express the natural color sense of the designs. Therefore, the direct printing method makes merchantability of the product low, and does not provide satisfaction to customers.